PolitiFact's inept defense of Hakeem Jeffries, with bonus flub

Why does PolitiFact so often appear defensive of Democrats? Ha ha, it's probably just my own bias that makes it seem that way. On the other hand, PolitiFact's habit of using inconsistent standards that unfairly aid Democrats while unfairly harming Republicans makes it seem maybe like I've got a point?

And that brings us to Democrat Hakeem Jeffries and the accusation of violent rhetoric.

Note PolitiFact tries to rig the game a bit right out of the box. Can a comment about redistricting double as a call to violence if the rhetoric meets a minimum violence threshold? We don't see why not, though don't look to us to set that bar.

PolitiFact sort-of tries to do the article the right way. It's always important to consider context. PolitiFact tells us Jeffries used the "maximum warfare" line strictly in the context of the partisan gerrymandering contest:

While Jeffries used those words, the soundbite lacks larger context.

Jeffries’ said "maximum warfare" to describe Democrats’ efforts to secure more House seats after Virginia voters passed a constitutional amendment on redistricting April 21, seen as a win for Democrats.

The problem? PolitiFact unwittingly gave its readers obvious evidence it wasn't giving the full context.

The photograph PolitiFact included with its story showed the poster the Democrats prominently displayed before, during and after Jeffries' speech. The poster has the "Maximum Warfare. Everywhere. All the Time" language with Trump in the foreground and key administration figure Stephen Miller in the background.

We fault PolitiFact for not considering the poster's impact on the context of Jefferies' speech. Displaying the poster puts everything that was said under the color of that image. There was plenty about battling Republican policies, suggesting redistricting was one such battle. 

It's also worth emphasizing the prominence of the Trump image in the poster. As noted, the poster doesn't do anything to suggest a connection to redistricting. It does suggest an intense conflict between Democrats and Republicans.

While we allow some legitimacy to the PolitiFact defense where GOP critics focused on Jeffries' use of the words, it counts as a significant error to omit mention of the poster while explaining the context of the speech.

And then there's the bonus flub.

Bonus Flub: Pirate's Code #9463

How often have we said PolitiFact treats its principles more as guidelines than actual rules, as with the "Pirate's Code" from the film "Pirates of the Caribbean"?

PolitiFact, stemming from its origins with the St. Petersburg Times, has a policy discouraging the use of anonymous sources. Here's how it's expressed in PolitiFact's statement of principles:

We emphasize primary sources and original documentation. We seek direct access to government reports, academic studies and other data. It’s not sufficient for us to get something second-hand. We don’t rely on what a campaign or elected official tells us -- we verify it independently.

In cases where PolitiFact must cite news reports from other media that rely on unnamed or unattributed sources (usually due to the extreme newsworthiness of the report), we note that we cannot independently verify their reporting.

The Jeffries defense traces the "Maximum Warfare" phrase to an anonymous source quoted in The New York Times. There's no admission PolitiFact was unable to confirm the report:

It wasn’t his first time using the phrase in a redistricting context— and Jeffries didn’t come up with it. It came up from someone on Trump’s side months earlier in media coverage of state redistricting battles.

In August 2025, The New York Times examined the consequences of Trump pushing Texas Republicans to redistrict, leading Democrats to talk about fighting "fire with fire." The Times wrote: "One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House's political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: "Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time."

That's good enough for the fact checkers who supposedly rely on on-the-record sourcing.

PolitiFact fact checkers stink.

PolitiFact's first GOP "Pants on Fire" of 2025 is a stinker

Reminder: Just because we're pressed for time to publish at PolitiFact Bias doesn't mean PolitiFact has improved one iota.

PolitiFact took an unusually long time to publish a "Pants on Fire" targeting a partisan political figure in 2025. Unsurprisingly, it was a Republican and it was President Trump.

Also unsurprisingly, it's not a good fact check. As we have previously observed, the mere fact that a fact check has a "False" or "Pants on Fire" rating counts as a good sign that it's a bad fact check. That goes for bad ratings of Democrats as well as Republicans, though of course the latter get hit with more of the unfair ratings.

So, on to business. What have we got on Feb. 19, 2025?

Any time a fact-checked claim contains only one word quoted from the supposed claimant, it's worth looking into whether the fact checker distorted the claim.

PolitiFact does offer some context and a link to a video. Such links should indicate at what point in time the relevant words occur, by the way.

PolitiFact:

"I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well," Trump said [16:16 -ed] while answering reporters’ questions Feb. 18 at his Mar-a-Lago resort. "But today I heard (from Ukraine), ‘Oh well, we weren't invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it, you could have made a deal."

PolitiFact makes it easy to reconcile Trump's statement above with his later statement that Putin should not have gone into Ukraine by simply not introducing the latter as relevant context. In other words, if readers don't know Trump said that, then there's no need to reconcile the conflicting statements for their readers.

17:53 (transcript ours, bold emphasis added):

"Look, you have leadership--and I like him (Zelenskyy) personally--he's fine. But I don't care about personally, I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that's allowed a war to go on that should've never even happened. Even without the United States. Look, we had a president who was grossly incompetent. He had no idea what he was doing. He said some very stupid things, like going in for portions and all of the things he made a lot of bad statements. But, uh, he's grossly incompetent and I think everyone knew that. But this is something that should've never happened. Would've never happened. And I used to discuss it with Putin. President Putin and I would talk about Ukraine and it was the apple of his eye, I will tell you that, but he never, there was never a chance of him going in, and I told him you better not go in, don't go in. And he understood that, and he understood it fully. But I'm only interested, I want to see if I can save maybe millions of lives, this could even end up in a World War III, I mean to be honest with you. You've been hearing now Europe is saying "Well, I think we're going to go in" and we're going to go. All of a sudden you're going to end up in World War III. Over something that should've never happened."

PolitiFact should have looked for clues in the context to help explain Trump's statement about "you should have never started it." With the added context, it seems plain Trump faults all the leaders involved, including Presidents Biden and Putin. Putin did end up going into Ukraine despite Trump's warnings, after all.

But why let context get in the way of a fact check "Gotcha!" story?

This gotcha story featured two bylines, Louis Jacobson and newbie Claire Cranford. Cranford's another from the Bill Adair-fed Duke pipeline.

Apparently nobody told her to scrub her social media of partisan commentary?

This is what you get when Big Journalism thinks "nonpartisanship" means not explicitly telling people who gets your vote.

Speaking of Bill Adair, he didn't see bias at PolitiFact then or now.

They're partisans who allow partisanship to affect their fact-checking.

We love this gem from PolitiFact:

We asked the White House for evidence that Ukraine had started the war and received no response.

Tell me you asked a loaded question in the name of journalism by, uh, telling me you asked a loaded question. That's how you help kill trust in your brand among moderates/independents as well as conservatives.

Here's how an objective journalist might ask about the quotation: "What did you mean when you said "They started it" while talking about Ukraine wanting a place at the table? Were you saying they started the war?"

Objective journalists do not insert their own opinions into questions they ask of others. They ask questions that free the interviewee to expound.

In this case, Trump had already expounded, though perhaps we could wish for even greater specificity. PolitiFact either didn't look for it or chose to ignore it.

Afters

We also like how PolitiFact identifies "they" as "Ukraine" except in the title of the fact check, where "they" turns into "Volodymyr Zelenskyy."

It's as though Zelenskyy chose "they" as one of his pronouns.

More Afters

It's hilarious what you can find in PolitiFact's work when you dig even a little. PolitiFact has a history of finding distinctly partisan experts to weigh in on its fact checks. Expert Erik Herron didn't have any partisan campaign giving history, but twiX ratted him out for canvassing for Kamala Harris.

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Magical PolitiFact fact-checking defies context, turns ambiguity into specificity

 When is a fact check not a fact check?

A fact check isn't a fact check when it takes an ambiguous claim and checks it as though it's specific.

Case in point (red X added):

So, twitterers said the Missouri attorney general has a website "where people can report trans individuals and the people that help them."

Report them for what? Being trans individuals?  As for the people that "help them," what kind of help? Starting their dead car batteries? Giving them directions when they're lost?

One can almost detect an implied narrative that Missouri's trans population is akin to Germany's Jews circa 1930.

Indeed, tweets in reply to the tweet in question suggested renaming Missouri as "Misstasi." The Stasi were East Germany's secret police.

The deck of PolitiFact's fact check gives away the bait-and-switch game:

Yes, Missouri's attorney general has a website for reporting concerns about trans health care 

That deck would count as perfect if PolitiFact was fact-checking a tweet that claimed something very much along the lines of "Missouri's attorney general has a website for reporting concerns about trans health care."

It's frankly appalling that the original tweet and the PolitiFact deck have so little in common.

We suggest that if the original tweet had matched PolitiFact's deck it would have cut reply mentions of the Stasi by 50 percent or more.

PolitiFact offers a nod or two to the truth before laboring to enhance the tweet's false implication:

Attorney General Andrew Bailey said March 23 he was launching the "Transgender Center Concerns Form," which he described as a "tip line" on his office’s website. Bailey said the form stems from his office’s investigation into a St. Louis pediatric transgender center.

It's true that's how Attorney General Bailey described the form hosted at the website. But PolitiFact's reporting deceives its readers by leaving out the remainder of the description (and keeping that content entirely out of its fact check; first paragraph bold emphasis added):

         Mar 23, 2023, 11:26 AM by AG Bailey

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - In an effort to protect children, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced today that his office has launched an online form where those who have experienced harm from gender transition interventions or witnessed troubling practices at transition clinics in Missouri can submit their concerns. This tip line stems from an investigation that Attorney General Bailey launched into a St. Louis pediatric transgender center that has been accused by a whistleblower of using experimental drugs on children, distributing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without individualized assessment, and even giving children these life-altering drugs without parental consent.

“As Attorney General, I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children. After receiving an alarming affidavit from a credible witness on child abuses allegedly occurring within a pediatric transgender clinic in St. Louis, I knew we had to take action and look into these allegations,” said Attorney General Bailey. “To that end, I have set up a tip line that parents can use to tell their stories as my office continues to investigate whether the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital has broken the law. No stone will be left unturned during the course of this investigation.”

As the first paragraph makes clear, the form was intended to allow citizens to express concerns about harmful sex transition treatments. Just like the Stasi used to do. Just kidding.

Ignoring the tweet's scaremongering, PolitiFact riffed on Bailey's supposed deceptive expansion of the purpose of the form from reporting about one clinic to reporting about anything up to and including the names of trans persons and those who help them. This paragraph immediately follows the one we quoted from PolitiFact up above:

But the form’s wording is not limited to the previous investigation. It broadly invites any "complaint or concern about gender transition intervention," that anyone has experienced or observed in the state.

PolitiFact's trying to make it seem that Bailey is pulling a fast one, either failing to notice the description that precedes Bailey's or else making up stuff on purpose to support a favored narrative.

Remember, PolitiFact has not and will not discuss that the purpose of the website was described as being aimed at harmful transgender treatment or other (presumably related) concerns.

PolitiFact helpfully adds that "The form does not specifically ask people to report the names of transgender people or doctors administering care, but it does ask for  'as much detail as possible.'"

So, names of trans people and those who "help" them? Basically?

PolitiFact never gets around to mentioning the form's aim of allowing people to report harms from trans treatments. The liberal bloggers posing as fact checkers instead note that people could use the form to report on trans people and their providers, then rushes to judgment:

Our ruling 

A tweet said Missouri’s attorney general launched a website "where people can report trans individuals and the people who help them."

The attorney general’s office launched an online form on which people can submit complaints and concerns about "gender transition intervention." The form does not specifically ask people to report the names of transgender people or doctors administering care, but it does ask for "as much detail as possible."

When it was announced, Bailey said the form related to an investigation into complaints about a specific St. Louis pediatric transgender center. Though social media users have speculated that the submitted information could be used more broadly to identify trans people and their providers, it remains unclear if that will happen. 

The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate this claim Mostly True. 

PolitiFact concludes it's "Mostly True" that the Missouri AG set up a website to report trans people and those who help them.

Those curious about what kinds of complaints the AG received about the "specific St. Louis pediatric transgender center" PolitiFact declined to name are out of luck. PolitiFact saw fit to leave that kind of stuff out.

Here are the first four allegations from a longer list:

“On several occasions, the doctors have continued prescribing medical transition even when a parent stated that they were revoking consent.”

“The Center does not require children to continue with mental health care after they prescribe cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers and even continues those medications when the patients directly report worsening mental health after initiating those medications“

“I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children. Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.”

“It is my belief that the Center does not track these outcomes because they do not want to have to report them to new patients and because they do not want to discontinue cross-sex hormone prescriptions. The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome.”

Why doesn't PolitiFact share so much as a hint of all that? If it's just unintentionally bad journalism, then it's bad journalism parsimoniously explained by left-leaning bias. If the fact check was deliberately slanted then left-leaning bias would also figure in.

PolitiFact is left-biased. Oft-repeated examples such as this confirm it.

Afters

On June 11, 2023 we reached out via Twitter to the fact check's author, Grace Abels, to point out one of the holes in the story. Our outreach met with PolitiFact's typical response: Silence, with no apparent attempt to remedy the story's shortcomings.

We eagerly look forward to updating this article with new information, should PolitiFact break its silence.

After Afters

Abels' Twitter profile offers "LGBTQ+ Reporter" as her job description, which is backed by PolitiFact's description on its website: "(A) staff writer focused on LGBTQ issues."

Abels' work history, albeit brief, includes glowing reviews of LGBT+ activists and activism. Therefore she's a neutral and objective journalist. Just in case that wasn't already obvious.

Nothing To See Here: Sanders blasts health insurance "profiteering"

While researching PolitiFact's false accusation that Democratic presidential candidate used "bad math" to criticize the budget gap created by fellow candidate Bernie Sanders' spending proposals, we stumbled over a claim from Sen. Sanders that was ripe for fact-checking.

Sanders said his proposed health care plan would end profiteering practices from insurance and drug companies that result in $100 billion or so in annual profits (bold emphasis added):

Just the other day, a major study came out from Yale epidemiologist in Lancet, one of the leading medical publications in the world. What they said, my friends, is Medicare for all will save $450 billion a year, because we are eliminating the absurdity of thousands of separate plans that require hundreds of billions of dollars of administration and, by the way, ending the $100 billion a year in profiteering from the drug companies and the insurance companies.

PolitiFact claims to use an "Is that true?" standard as one of its main criteria for choosing which claims to check.

We have to wonder if that's true, or else how could a fact checker pass over the claim that profiteering netted $100 billion in profits for those companies? Do fact checkers think "profit" and "profiteering" are the same thing?

Is a fact checker who thinks that worthy of the name?

Sanders' claim directly implies that the Affordable Care Act passed by Democrats in 2010 was ineffective with its efforts to circumscribe insurance company profits. The ACA set limits on profits and overhead ("medical loss ratios"). Excess profits, by law, get refunded to the insured.

Sanders said it's not working. And the fact checkers don't care enough to do a fact check?

Of course PolitiFact went through the motions of checking a similar claim, as we pointed out. But using "profiteering" in the claim changes things.

Or should.

Ultimately, it depends on whether PolitiFact has the same interest in finding falsehoods from Democrats as it does for Republicans.

PolitiFact and the Contradiction Fiction

We consider it incumbent on fact checkers to report the truth.

PolitiFact's struggles in that department earn it our assessment as the worst of the mainstream fact checkers. In our latest example, PolitiFact reported that President Donald Trump had contradicted his claim that he had never said Mexico would pay for the border wall with a check.

We label that report PolitiFact's contradiction fiction. Fact checkers should know the difference between a contradiction and a non-contradiction.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

"When during the campaign I would say ‘Mexico is going to pay for it,’ obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they're going to write out a check," Trump told reporters. "I said they're going to pay for it. They are."

Later on the same day while visiting the border in Texas, Trump offered the same logic: "When I say Mexico is going to pay for the wall, that's what I said. Mexico is going to pay. I didn't say they're going to write me a check for $20 billion or $10 billion."

We’ve seen the president try to say he never said something that he very much said before, so we wondered about this case.

Spoiler: Trump has it wrong.

We found several instances over the last few years, and in campaign materials contradicting the president’s statement.

PolitiFact offers three links in evidence of its "found several instances" argument, but relies on the campaign material for proof of the claimed contradiction.

We'll cover all of PolitiFact evidence and show that none of it demonstrated that Mr. Trump contradicted himself on this point. Because we can.

Campaign Material

PolitiFact made two mistakes in trying to prove its case from a Trump Campaign description of how Trump would make Mexico pay for the border wall. First, it ignored context. Second, it applied spin to one of the quotations it used from the document.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

"It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year," the memo said.

Trump proposed measures to compel Mexico to pay for the wall, such as cutting off remittances sent from undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. via wire transfers.

Then, the memo says, if and when the Mexican government protested, they would be told to pay a lump sum "to the United States to pay for the wall, the Trump Administration will not promulgate the final rule, and the regulation will not go into effect." The plan lists a few other methods if that didn’t work, like the trade deficit, canceling Mexican visas or increasing visa fees.

We placed bold emphasis on the part of the memo PolitiFact mentioned but ignored in its reasoning.

If the plan mentions methods to use if Mexico did not fork over the money directly, then how can the memo contradict Trump's claim he did not say Mexico would pay by check? Are fact checkers unable to distinguish between "would" and "could"? If Trump says Mexico could pay by check he does not contradict that claim by later saying he did not say Mexico would pay by check.

And what's so hard to understand about that? How can fact checkers not see it?

To help cinch its point, PolitiFact quotes from another section of the document, summarizing it as saying Mexico would pay for the wall with a lump sum payment: "(Mexico) would be told to pay a lump sum 'to the United States to pay for the wall'"). Except the term "lump sum" doesn't occur in the document.

There's reason for suspicion any time a journalist substitutes for the wording in the original document, using only a partial quotation and picking up mid-sentence. Here's the reading from the original:

On day 3 tell Mexico that if the Mexican government will contribute the funds needed to the United States to pay for the wall ...

We see only one potential justification for embroidering the above to make it refer to a "lump sum." That's from interpreting "It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year" as specifying a lump sum payment. We think confirmation bias would best explain that interpretation. It's more reasonable to take the statement to mean that paying for the wall once and having it over with is an obvious choice when it helps preserve a greater amount of income for Mexico annually after that. And the line does not express an expectation of a lump-sum payment but instead the strength (rightly or wrongly) of the bargaining position of the United States.

In short, PolitiFact utterly failed to make its case with the example it chose to emphasize.

... And The Rest

 (these are weak, so they occur after a page break)